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Deborah Haarsma serves as the President of BioLogos, a position she has held since January 2013. Previously, she served as professor and chair in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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CHRISTIANITY AND SCIENCE

Can science and Scripture be reconciled?

The heavens declare the glory of God...The law of the Lord is perfect, refreshing the soul. Psalm 19:1, 7 (NIV)

In Christian belief, God reveals himself in both the written book of the Bible and the created “book” of the natural world. Because of the consistent character of God, these two cannot conflict. Yet at times they seem to say contradictory things to us about the origin and shape of God’s creation. What do we do when the results of science disagree with common biblical interpretations?

One response is to say that the Bible is right and science is wrong, but this often elevates a particular biblical interpretation to the authority of the Bible itself. Scripture is always given and received within a cultural context. As we attempt to understand the Bible in today’s context, Christians sometimes disagree on the meaning of particular passages. Some scriptural teachings, like the accounts of Jesus’ death and resurrection, have clear meanings that have been affirmed by the church throughout the centuries and around the world. Other teachings, like the baptism of adults vs. infants, are ambiguous and their interpretation has been debated for centuries. Some interpretations have been challenged and changed as Christians re-evaluated them in light of the whole of Scripture (the ownership of slaves serves as a dramatic example). Church tradition has also been appropriately challenged as new historical or scientific evidence presents itself. Consider the scientific work of Galileo, which overturned an earth-centered worldview and thus irrevocably affected our interpretation of passages like Psalm 93:1.

Just as the Bible is always interpreted by fallible humans, so too science is the human interpretation of nature. Thus, its theories are subject to critique and revision. A good example is the racist ideas of “eugenics” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which were rightly questioned by many Bible-believing Christians. But science also has internal methods for reviewing evidence and weeding out errors (eugenics was eventually rejected by mainstream science). After theories are tested and refined by many scientists all over the world, they give an ever more reliable interpretation of physical reality. This is true of many aspects of evolutionary theory, which have been tested and confirmed by numerous scientists in many fields over a long period of time.

Scientific data can sometimes serve as God’s way of warning us when we are standing too close to the scriptural “picture,” or at the wrong angle, or with the wrong expectations. The purpose of science is not to verify nor to add to inspired Scripture, but science can help us eliminate improper ways of reading it. Likewise, Christians should thoughtfully and appropriately encourage science to rigorously test its own theories and question its own assumptions, especially when science appears to contradict Scripture. Yet because they are both means of God’s revelation of himself to us, they must work together towards an ultimate harmony.

In this video Conversation, Rev. N.T. Wright responds to the question, “If you take Genesis in a non-literal fashion, especially the creation stories, why take anything in the Bible literally—such as the Gospels? Do you take the Gospels literally?”

But science is more than a body of knowledge. Science is better described as a process by which people gain that knowledge. Let’s examine three methods used in the process of gaining scientific knowledge: experimental, observational, and historical.

The competing models and arguments may have originated in differing worldview beliefs, but eventually the experiments and observations push the scientific community toward a consensus shared by scientists of many different worldviews.

Jesus said that we are to love the Lord our God with all our mind. That means scientific investigation ought to be an act of worship. BioLogos is helping to recover an enormously important endeavor for the church in our day, and I am grateful to God that it exists and is bringing light to places that too often only get heat.